Old Creole Days eBook

Madame Delphine looked down, twining her handkerchief
among her fingers.

He repeated his proposition.

“You will come firz by you’se’f?”
she asked.

“Iv you wand.”

She lifted up once more her eye of faith. That
was her answer.

“Come,” he said, gently, “I wan’
sen’ some bird ad you’ lill’ gal.”

And they went away, Madame Delphine’s spirit
grown so exaltedly bold that she said as they went,
though a violent blush followed her words:

“Miche Vignevielle, I thing Pere Jerome mighd
be ab’e to tell you someboddie.”

CHAPTER XI.

FACE TO FACE.

Madame Delphine found her house neither burned nor
rifled.

“Ah! ma, piti sans popa! Ah I my
little fatherless one!” Her faded bonnet fell
back between her shoulders, hanging on by the strings,
and her dropped basket, with its “few lill’
becassines-de-mer” dangling from the
handle, rolled out its okra and soup-joint upon the
floor. “Ma piti! kiss!—­kiss!—­kiss!”

“But is it good news you have, or bad?”
cried the girl, a fourth or fifth time.

The mother dropped into a chair, covered her face
with her apron, and burst into tears, then looked
up with an effort to smile, and wept afresh.

“What have you been doing?” asked the
daughter, in a long-drawn, fondling tone. She
leaned forward and unfastened her mother’s bonnet-strings.
“Why do you cry?”

“For nothing at all, my darling; for nothing—­I
am such a fool.”

The girl’s eyes filled. The mother looked
up into her face and said:

“No, it is nothing, nothing, only that”—­turning
her head from side to side with a slow, emotional
emphasis, “Miche Vignevielle is the best—­best
man on the good Lord’s earth!”

Olive drew a chair close to her mother, sat down and
took the little yellow hands into her own white lap,
and looked tenderly into her eyes. Madame Delphine
felt herself yielding; she must make a show of telling
something:

“He sent you those birds!”

The girl drew her face back a little. The little
woman turned away, trying in vain to hide her tearful
smile, and they laughed together, Olive mingling a
daughter’s fond kiss with her laughter.

“There is something else,” she said, “and
you shall tell me.”

“Yes,” replied Madame Delphine, “only
let me get composed.”

But she did not get so. Later in the morning
she came to Olive with the timid yet startling proposal
that they would do what they could to brighten up
the long-neglected front room. Olive was mystified
and troubled, but consented, and thereupon the mother’s
spirits rose.

The work began, and presently ensued all the thumping,
the trundling, the lifting and letting down, the raising
and swallowing of dust, and the smells of turpentine,
brass, pumice and woollen rags that go to characterize
a housekeeper’s emeute; and still, as
the work progressed, Madame Delphine’s heart
grew light, and her little black eyes sparkled.